This is the first comprehensive case study of an Indian mental hospital. It focuses on the largest psychiatric institution in south Asia prior to Indian independence and assesses the demographics of its patient population, death and illness statistics, diagnostic categories and medical treatments. Earlier work has examined the role of British psychiatry within the context of nineteenth-century colonial expansion. This study breaks new ground by exploring how the changing imperial order during the early twentieth century, with a particular focus on the ‘Indianisation’ of the medical services, affected institutional trends. These local developments are set within the wider purview of transnational networks. Themes covered include gender, culture and race, and changing medical theories, conceptualisations and plural clinical practices within the context of medical standardisation. The limitations of institution-based data and statistical analysis and the pitfalls of post-hoc assessment and comparison of diagnostic categories and classifications are explored. The book is based on a range of original sources, including hospital reports, medical journals and textbooks, and official and private correspondence. It is relevant to historians of colonial and western psychiatry, comparative and transnational history, as well as social historians of south Asia more generally.

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Endorsements:

‘Ernst paints a fascinating picture of a mental hospital in India where doctors and patients struggle with the problems and paradoxes of modernity during an era of dramatic political change and medical innovation on a global scale.’

—Joseph Alter, Pittsburgh University

‘A very important and original contribution to the growing literature on psychiatry and colonialism, notable for its tight focus on a single mental hospital for Indians rather than the imperial ruling class.’ —Andrew Scull, University of California, San Diego

‘An in-depth account wherein individual and institutional histories coalesce, a work of honest scholarship which will be useful for medical historians, sociologists and lay readers alike.’

—Deepak Kumar, Jawaharlal Nehru University

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Contents:

Chapter 1 | Indianisation and its Discontents

– Towards Indianisation

– Structural Inequities

– Medical Politics and European Racial Prejudice

– The Medical Market and Indian Competition

– Professional Discrimination and Historiographic Marginalisation

– Professional Closure and the Pathologisation of a Successful Community

– The Decline of the ‘Good Parsi’

– Collaborators, Competitors and Ambivalence

– Indianisation and Histories of Medicine

– Subalterns

Chapter 2 | The Patients: The Demographics of Gender and Age, Locality, Occupation, Caste and Religion